763 Million Records Exposed in Verifications.io Data Breach

Date: 03/13/2019

A recent data breach of Verifications.io, a company that approves or verifies email addresses for third-parties, exposed 763 million consumer records. Verifications.io ensures third-parties’ email marketing campaigns are being sent out to verified accounts, and not just fake emails. The unsecured database discovered online by two security researchers did not contain things like passwords or Social Security numbers; however, it did contain an assortment of data points like mortgage amounts, interest rates on loans and social media email logins, along with identifiers like gender and birthdate.

There have been almost 7.7 billion compromised accounts since data breach tracking began in 2013. The total number of compromised data sets listed on Have I Been Pwned?, a security website that lets users see if their identifying information has been exposed, now exceeds the total number of people on Earth.

The real question that the researchers and Troy Hunt, founder of Have I Been Pwned?, want to know is how Verifications.io got its hands on all of this information in the first place. The Estonian-based company has refused to respond to questions from different news outlets and has taken down its entire website as of March 4, 2019. In fact, Hunt has publicly asked for the data breach victims’ help via Twitter. What are you supposed to do when the company that comes under attack had your information without your direct permission? If you can identify your email address compromised in the data breach and used it uniquely (i.e. for one service), researchers are asking that you contact them so they can try to track the path of data sharing.


Contact the Identity Theft Resource Center for toll-free, no-cost assistance at (888) 400-5530. For on-the-go assistance, check out the free ID Theft Help App from ITRC.

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